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Comment by la_barba | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to improve the matching of ads to the viewer without violating their privacy?

The matching is in itself a violation of privacy, at least if you interpret the right of privacy as "The right to be left alone", as former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it.

I think that’s incorrect, relevant ads could be displayed based purely on the site content, without user info attached to ad calls. We’ve been there.

Why the downvote? Care to provide a reason?

From [the guidelines](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Thanks, didn’t know about that. I wish I had received a better feedback there, though, as I’m deeply interested in the topic and generally it’s quite hard for me to find negative opinions, counterarguments I could work on. I find negative feedback more helpful, if it’s constructive.

I think maybe the problem with the comment was that it started with "I think that’s incorrect" but it reads like a non sequitur. The comment to which yours was replying was claiming that matching ads to viewers is itself a privacy violation but your point seems to have been that it – matching ads to viewers – is unnecessary, which, altho related, is a different point and doesn't follow from you thinking that the other commenter's point is "incorrect".

I think you're right in that "site content" is a good-enough proxy for users/viewers/targets for advertising, tho I also readily understand why advertisers would always like more info with which to target their ads.

True and irrelevant. If you're displaying ads based on site content, you are matching ads to the site content, not to the viewer.

It is actually relevant because they are matching the ads to the user, only it happens by a proxy variable which is the site you are visiting.

The original question was "Is there any way to improve the matching of ads to the viewer without violating their privacy?"

Your answer is that we should match something other than the user, that happens to correlate with user interests. That is, by definition, not matching ads to viewers.

In think either our idea of "by definition" or something else differs.

Viewers get ads matching their interests, as proven by the fact that they are on a related website. I don't see how that isn't "matching ads to viewers"?

Yes, thats what I was thinking too. For Google, being in the ad business itself necessitates that Google's trajectory will be on shaky ground w.r.t privacy.

They will leave you alone if you choose not to send an HTTP GET call requesting content.

Yes! Contextual Targeting (target based on what I am reading) could work, although the industry seems to be clinging to Behavioural Targeting (target based on who I am). This will become more important for Open Web due to the 3p cookie constraints, regulatory changes etc..., but Google/Amazon/FB are less likely to be impacted.

In fact Contextual Targeting predates the current approaches, but it became less important once advertises/adtech companies started preaching the thinly veiled idea of using behaviourism to trigger conversions/less products.

Changes like this are slow to introduce due to technical and (mainly) structural/cultural issues in the Advertising Industry, but that’s a topic for an entire essay/series of blog posts.

Source: I work in AdTech and deal with privacy/the ethical impact of programmatic, content monetisation models. Opinions obv. mine.

Yes, we can do contextual targeting, but after that, what are the ways to improve upon the outcomes (from an advertisers standpoint) without violating privacy?

Depends on the outcomes/metrics they’re interested in. For instance, I genuinely believe that targeting based on content is less dangerous from brand safety/brand perception perspective.

How about conversions, sweet $$?

I think replacing audiences with a semantic targeting model (nlp) could perform almost as good (if not better). Behavioural Targeting performance is overrated (feel free to look it up, esp. CPM vs. conversions, it’s quite interesting, I’m on holiday and shouldn’t be sitting on HN anyway!).

Another, deeper point-how much advertising do we (or brands) really need? Do alternatives exist, are they expensive/hard? What problem does advertising solve? I know this sounds like a silly question, but I think it’s worth asking given the current technical landscape and the ethical impact.

Well.. I'm totally OK with the efficiency in online-advertising being low. My point was that after a certain point, there is no way to get a better ad-to-viewer match without violating privacy. Google was never on the right side of privacy, and given the business they're in, they never will be.

Mind sharing which company you work for? I'm interested in scaling contextual, privacy-focused publisher targeting solutions.

On the PG/PMP side, the usage is obvious, but I'm also curious what it will take for publisher-provided data to be trusted in the open exchange environment where historically advertisers and DSPs have tended to not trust the publisher-supplied categorization.

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